From Now On


1

The main thing I want to ask them
through their translation program
is whether there has been
some twist since my time,
so that everything will collapse
after all, and be purged
in fire (I could accept that),
or stop, or be made to stop?
Or do we still face
endless, accelerating
expansion, with eventually one proton
alone in a space
equal to that of the universe
in my day?  No bailout
from another dimension, no escape
from everything escaping … I wait
for them to tell me
not to identify with that proton
but to face the challenge, fulfill the duties
of the near term.  It’s the only wisdom
I expect.  Subdued, hesitant,
they lack even jetpacks –
emblem of any tolerable future.
Are visited by angels
of some sort, which to me is no substitute.

2

I’m not sure what’s calling,
except that it’s human.
And what it’s saying is
*Everyone in the pool!
Hot-dog-eating contest
at three, followed by a kegger!!*
… no, more respectable,
warmer or stuffier
than that, because I am.  And it wants me.
To read, of course.
My work.  Which is what?
Accounts?  “Tenuous recovery
over the last quarter.”
“So many shipments and dealers
seized – good work, people!”
Or perhaps I’m expected to sing:
whining, violent Country – no,
the command
is different: sensitive, cultured,
a voice I always
wanted to hear.  And what it’s saying is
*Everyone in the pool … ?*
No, something urgent,
moral, sublime, I’d do anything
to serve,
to deserve.  If it would just wait
for me to extract
smooth swift joints
from this derelict frame,
keen eyes from rheum, dense muscles
from wrinkles, myself from this bed.

3

The bodies of owners and rulers
are part of their propaganda.
Buff, shirtless hunter.
Plain proletarian
with bad hair amidst immaculate generals.
Stern playboy, fluid housewife.
No doubt the principle
will obtain north of the former Arctic Circle
when the time comes.  Barrel-like thugs
roll along corridors.
Surprise inspection: Reactor, Hydroponics,
Recycling, the barracks and crèche.
Check the Comm Center.
From the South, a last few isolated pleas,
never answered, soon submerged.
Outside, the missile emplacements.
At the edge of the minefield
the strange new heather grows; there’s even a flower.
They inspect it, their eyes, lost in flesh,
secretly damp, or so they tell themselves, breathing
filtered wind from lands half-desert half-swamp.
Then they bark at their guards and go in.
Why the obesity?
Some regressed archetype, telling their charges
*It could have been worse.  You might have been soulless
discarnate bytes floating
among the stars.  Instead it’s Man
by whom you are watched over, loved, and eaten.*

4

He wants to be a good father –
what father doesn’t?  So as the
kid grabs a bottled mocha,
he says *Christopher, put that back.
I’m not going to buy it for you.
You don’t have your own money
so you can’t buy it for yourself.
Somebody else will want to buy it
and he won’t want your sticky fingerprints
all over it.  What do you want?
What do you want?  What do you want?
No.  They don’t have milkshakes
here.  (Give him a hot chocolate.)
Put that down.  Did you hear me?
I told you to do something,
Christopher.  Because it’s not yours.
You’re going to sit there and not bother people
while daddy drinks his coffee.
You’re going to sit like a human being.
You’re going to sit like a human being.
What are you going to sit like?
I didn’t hear you.  I asked what you’re going
to sit like.  No.  Because I said so.*
The voice turns the coffeeshop green.
It enlists everyone.  The kid himself
is barely audible, but never stops
poking, squirming, as affectless as the voice.
At least he isn’t a screamer.
So it’s possible to think
mercury, nitrates, television,
sugar, video-games, easier to hate him,
easiest to hate the voice
and view the kid as already trying
(don’t we all?) to squeeze love from bureaucracy.

5

What is sympathy?  There are massacres,
but they all go by so fast –
one is somehow never prepared.
A bourgeois who identifies with victims
rebukes other bourgeois
for “compassion fatigue.”  The other bourgeois
hear what he’s saying and drop compassion.
To be a bourgeois means to want to be
a bourgeois so essentially
you could never become a victim.  So that when
you do, you can’t think, or hear yourself,
because no one hears victims.  In Tokyo
the homeless have begun to live
between the inner and outer doors
of restrooms and in public parks;
yet they still wear little white breathing-masks,
and bow when addressed.  When the bourgeoisie
votes left, it’s not out of sympathy
with victims, but itself.  Bourgeois critics
would decry the dichotomy
Bourgeois/Victim; the obsolescence,
even elitism, of “bourgeois.”  Doesn’t poetry,
they will ask, despise such pigeonholes;
doesn’t it value individuality above all?
It is, in fact, in search
of the individual that poets
long since abandoned this planet.
We await the words
of the black, vaguely starfish-shaped
philosophers of Titan,
each on her ice-mountain.

6

And Hope?  Well, the truth
is it’s better
with no capital letter –
something revocable, renewable;
a kind of opportunism.  I roam
the camp.  High alert.
Night-goggles, no fires.
The green faces against green-black
are as drained of, bored with emotion
as those in shantytowns surrounding,
replacing, the major cities,
from which these have, so to speak, escaped.
Yet my role
is one of authority here,
which perhaps leaves nothing
to be said.  I need
a squad to patrol.  We set forth
through the green.  Ahead, an enemy position
intermittently fires, and their loudspeakers
blare my words
like slogans, and my name, and call me
a hero.  Well, that’s why
we fight.  I’ve a sudden
exhausted idea for removing that gun –
an absurd yet crystalline
vision of bringing the war to an end –
and look back to see who’s with me,
and find only one,
already submitting
residual thoughts to the dark earth.